when i throw myself a pity party i go all out!

Did I ever tell you guys how I hate everything, cuz I do. Last night, surrounded by the murmurs and loud monkey groans of couples paired off in bedrooms, (while i sat in my room trying to quietly read yet another novel by some too-young, over-hyped, over-privileged guy) I had no choice but to play the first thing i could find at top volume. It turned out to be The Smiths _Best of-Vol. II_. Nice. Does that officially make me a sullen teenager again?

Beware, this post may soon become "10 Things You Hate About Me" aka "The Unsuccessful Taming the Shrew."
speaking of which...
shrew
Pronunciation: 'shrü, esp Southern 'srü
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English shrewe evil or scolding person, from Old English scrEawa shrew (animal)
1 : any of a family (Soricidae) of small chiefly nocturnal insectivores related to the moles and distinguished by a long pointed snout, very small eyes, and velvety fur
2 : an ill-tempered scolding woman

A bug eatin' mole, huh? That's interesting...

Anyway, there's nothing quite like a night full of gentle reminders that you're a black-hearted spinster, including a nice chat with your internet boyfriend. (yeah, i have one. okay?@?!?) So, I have this theory that the most cynical/sarcastic people are actually the hopeless optimists/romantics, which is why they find humanity/the world so incredibly disappointing.
The theory that now follows is that there's some sort of invisible chain around my legs, made of that hopeless optimism/romanticism, that prevents me from fleeing to the outer reaches of western massachusetts to live alone in an old farmhouse with a couple of dogs and a garden that hums in the spring and the only disconcerting thing about where i live is whether those crazy kids who stole the pumpkin pie i had cooling on the window sill will return the pie plate, or whether the cost of doing historic preservation window replacements really would save me money in the long run, what with the heating bills with drafty old windows and all.

i love where i live and the people i live with, my love life or endless lack thereof, not so much. whatever, at least i still have the smiths.

on over-privileged over-hyped male novelists OR a review of benjamin kunkel's Indecision

okay, i'm really trying to read this fucking book, guys. i really am. i like the journal kunkel helps edit, n + 1, a lot and i like the short fiction and essays of his included in it and the ny times
told me it was supposed to be all awesome and stuff, which we all know
must make it so (if it was 1948). but i'm having a hard time getting
over how reading it feels exactly the same way it did when i read
Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity...by
the trail of dead. it's amusing enough to move along, to even
keep you reading (if you're bored and don't feel like watching netflix
or buffy) but it's completely devoid of true substance. there are,
however, lots of moments where i know i'm supposed to feel some weighty
issues coming to the forefront of my mind and get all philosophical or
whatever but mostly it just feels like i'm reading the inner monologue
from some guy i don't identify with at all.



i'm only half-way through but here's what the premise is so far...

upper upper-middle class guy from connecticut living in new york city
gets a pill still under review from his doctor roommate that's supposed
to treat indecision. he then gets a loan from his commodities broker
father and takes off to ecuador to go visit an old school friend and
ends up travelling around with her roommate.

what's supposed to make it all different is that instead of laying out
the horrors of those scary third world nations and taking advantage of
some locals in order to have a stellar(!) trip kunkel's protagonist
takes the same narrative but apparently tries to make it ironic under
the guise of the character being too clueless to really understand what
he's experiencing.

total bullshit if you ask me. not that you did, but it's a blog after all.



which brings me to my real point. sort of...

my co-worker, katie, and i often play nerdy literary games to entertain
ourselves at work. one time we used advanced book exchange to try and
pin down what author's signed first edition was the most valuabe
(Tolkien, by the way, with Pynchon in a close second). one day i came
in with this question: there's all these hyped, contemporary, young,
male, american novelists (safran foer, kunkel, eggers, etc) but are
there any american female novelists that are just as hyped.

after a couple of hours, and a long list of female novelists from other
countries (zadie smith, divakaruni, danticat, yadda) we couldn't come
up with a single name that could equal the hype and acclaim of those
guys.

we did, gratefully, come to the conclusion that contemporary, young,
american, female short story writers have far surpassed their male
peers. well, kind of.

ultimately, i found the whole thing to be incredibly depressing and had
one of those moments where i actually believed that i was chosen to
write the "definitive american novel."

i ended up just going outside to smoke a cigarette with my peppermint tea.